Web applications offer a diversity of functionality and data that is accessible through a standard web browser. The functionality and data are accessible through making hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) requests to the web applications or associated web servers. The web applications process these requests and return data in the form of hyper-text markup language (HTML) and extensible hyper-text markup language (XHTML) documents.
A programmer of a client application that does not want to merely display the returned data as a web browser would, has few desirable options to obtain the data in usable format. The programmer must code the client application to make queries specific to a particular web application. The programmer must also code the client application to parse the returned data to obtain the desired data and then reformat the data into a data structure that the client application can utilize. This coding can be time consuming and is not easily reusable as extensive additional coding has to be done to interact with each web application.